The church of Kevin Garnett
Anything is possible.
Kevin Garnett is less than a year older than me and arrived in Minneapolis as a teenage rookie with the Timberwolves less than a year after I started school at the University of Minnesota.
He was the first transcendent star athlete that I rooted for as a young adult, a player whose unfiltered enthusiasm and audacious talent were pitted against what sometimes feels like the inevitably tragic arc of a Minnesota pro sports career.
The Wolves went 26-56 in his rookie season, then improved to 40-42 when Stephon Marbury joined him in Minnesota a year later. That season also marked the first of eight consecutive playoff appearances for the Wolves.
Sounds great, right?
Well … Marbury also forced a trade that severed the dynamic duo. Joe Smith signed an illegal contract that cost them multiple first-round draft picks. Those first seven playoff appearances all ended in first-round losses.
In the eighth, with Garnett finally given the right supporting mix (most notably veterans Sam Cassell and Latrell Sprewell), the Wolves made the 2004 Western Conference finals.
It was a great run. It also absolutely did not last. Minnesota fell hard enough that they missed the playoffs the next 13 seasons. Garnett, after suffering through three of those, was traded to Boston in the summer of 2007.
Freed from the Wolves’ while paired with veterans Paul Pierce and Ray Allen, Garnett’s Celtics won a championship in their first year together in 2007-08.
Of course.
And yet Garnett was such a force, someone who had given all his sweat and talent to his 12 seasons with the Wolves, that the overwhelming sentiment I remember from that time is happiness for KG and not bitterness that he had won somewhere else.
The single moment that distilled Garnett’s career came shortly after the Celtics had blown out the Lakers in Game 6 to win the championship. Asked how it felt to be an NBA champion, Garnett seemed to be in a sort of hypnotic zone of gratitude. It took several seconds, but he finally said: “Anything is possible” before repeating the phrase with increased volume and gusto.
I’ve thought about that moment countless times in the last 17 years, but it wasn’t until recently that I connected the dots on how it distills my evolving belief system.
Kevin Garnett is my church. Anything is possible is my religion.
I grew up without organized religion and with a skepticism (cynicism?) over the existence of God instilled in me by my parents.
My mom was raised Catholic and my maternal grandmother remains devout in the church at age 92. I attended my cousins’ baptisms along with weddings and funerals, many of them at Holy Family Catholic Church in Grand Forks.
On road trips with my grandma — just the two of us went to Colorado, West Virginia and Iowa at various times — a morning sometimes started with a church service in an unfamiliar town.
The process of a Catholic service became vaguely familiar from these scant experiences. I would follow along with some of the hymns, hang back during communion, turn to my neighbors to say peace by with you” and generally wait for the clock to run out.
It did not spark in me much by the way of grand curiosity. My dogma was non-belief, and that was that.
I tended to scoff at the idea of organized religion, emphasizing in my mind the flaws of rigid thinking and unproven faith.
Why put so much energy and give so much control of your life to the unknowable? Why not invest more in the here and now, the things we can know and see?
But then there came to be a question I couldn’t shake. The more I thought about it, the more I had a sense of something undeniably larger than myself or the known realm.
It has not and probably will not lead me toward any particular recognized sect or organized belief in a higher power, but the question has great meaning to me nonetheless.
Why is there anything?
The earliest ancestors of humans have been here for 5 million years, and they evolved from …
No, before that.
Earth formed about 4.6 billion years ago, a process of space collisions that took millions of years to complete and involved multiple random yet precise calibrations …
No, before that.
The universe is estimated to be 13.8 billion years old, an unfathomable amount of time thrust into motion by what scientists say was a “Big Bang” …
No, before that.
It is now theorized that before the Big Bang, the universe “underwent a breathtaking cosmic expansion, doubling in size at least 80 times in a fraction of a second.” It was “fueled by a mysterious form of energy that permeated empty space itself” …
No, before that. Why is there anything? What was the beginning of it all? Something took us from nothing to everything, starting us on a journey from billions of years ago to where I sit typing while surrounded by trees and light and language and impossibilities and thoughts right now, and I cannot explain it other than to imagine some sort of creation.
I don’t know what form it takes. But I do know that for me it is the meeting point of science and belief, a space where both can be real.
To that end, it has helped me become more comfortable with general belief in the unknown — not the cheap kind that masks itself as skepticism and “just asking questions”, but actual belief in something that can neither be proven nor disproven.
I can appreciate a church for the idea of shared beliefs instead of just for the sense of community it fosters. I can also still sit with the idea that it’s just as arrogant to say definitively that there is or isn’t a God.
What we don’t know — the might — is vast, uncomfortable and beautiful.
And there are very few things we can imagine that are more absurd than the things we already know are true.
Why is there anything?
I can’t answer that, but the best guess for me comes from the church of Kevin Garnett.
Anything is possible.
Do you think you would ever have the answers to these otherwise unfathomable questions if the Wolves were ever moved to the Eastern Conference?
For a long time I had the belief that all of the gods that people worship are really “middle management.” They’re the entities that people look to for questions but they’re not really “in charge,” if you know what I mean? The being in charge there is no conception or idea that can describe it. It’s not even conceivable to most people.
Like you I’m not especially religious. I hover between agnostic and atheist. The idea of what or who spawned this whole thing I’ve thought about before and I like the middle management theory the best so far.